https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=azz8wyvVeYE
John Ravecki and Sean Coyne have together authored a new book, Mentoring the Machines. It’s a book about artificial intelligence and the path forward that further develops the arguments of how to align artificial intelligence to human flourishing, and it sets those arguments into beautiful and accessible writing. So welcome everyone. This is going to be a special Voices with Ravecki series that I’m doing with my frequent interlocutor and friend, Jordan Hall. We’ve done a bunch of series on faith, we’ve done series on sacred, on different ideas about the way the meeting crisis is intersecting with the sort of acceleration that Jordan continually puts his finger on of complexity. I propose a topic to Jordan which I thought might give us some additional conceptual vocabulary, theoretical grammar. I’m also going to also point to a third thing it might give us, which is, and I’m going to argue for this, Morton doesn’t, but I’m going to argue for this, a religious attitude that may be appropriate to bringing about what he advocates for, which is attunement to reason. Before we begin, I want to acknowledge that a lot of this comes out of, I read HyperObjects by Morton in collaboration with my good friend and colleague Dan Chappie, and I’m not going to keep referencing him, but I just want to acknowledge that my thinking is shared with him, because we read the book together and collaborated together. And so when I proposed this to Jordan, Jordan thought that was a great idea, he is familiar with the term, but he wants to get into it more. And so there’s two things we kind of want to explore here. One is more properly, you know, what is HyperObject and what’s the nature of their existence? And then more long term, what’s the relevance of this? And I have a specific proposal about that. And the proposal is going to go something like this. I’m going to use a great literary example as an analogy. In The Republic by Plato, Plato tries to understand what it is to be a just person. And the psyche is, of course, very hard. And so what he does is he blows it up and he creates a corresponding model of the republic. That’s the name of the book, A City. And by having that larger picture that’s external to our own identity, we can get a better idea of justice. And then what we can do is move back and forth between the justice of the psyche and the justice of the city. And that actually affords our transformation in a process that he calls the Ascent of Anagogy. And what I’m going to propose is something very similar is being argued for by Morton. The appearance on our individual and cultural radar of hyperobjects is startling. He calls it a quake in being. But if we pursue it carefully, we come to realize that the hyperobject, according to Morton, actually reveals properties of every object, of everything. And therefore, it demands from us a fundamental transformation on our relationship to all of being. And so and that’s why it has this transformative religious aspect to it. So how does that sound, Morton, as a way of going forward? Awesome. Great. OK, so I thought what I’d do is I’ll go through the four sort of central properties of hyperobjects while talking about a couple of examples. So. Let’s take two examples. And I choose them because they come from sort of different domains in some senses, but not in others. One is the process of evolution. And then the other is global warming. Now, what are some of the properties that we should note about these these entities? These entities. Well, first of all, they are they are in some sense entities. We think of them as having an existence. They are they form some kind of intelligible hold to us, although we’ll have to negotiate that intelligibility. And right. And they’re not just an aggregate of other things like a pile of rocks or something like that. They they they they have behaviors, causal behaviors that can be attributed to them as a whole. And also we can see them as having parts that are coordinated together, et cetera. I won’t get into the deep ontology, but the idea is they form a respectable unity in our mind. But that what’s unusual about them is they don’t have the kind of unity that we attribute to our prototypical object. So here’s my jackknife. This is a prototypical object. Notice it has parts and the parts interact. But notice what I can do with it. It is local. It has a determinate Cartesian coordinate specificity and time and place. And here it is. Here it is. And if it’s here, it can’t be here. Right now, it can it can take up a continuous space, but it is localized. Now, the first important property about hyper objects like global warming and evolution is they’re non local. You can’t point and say they’re, you know, in in in Wisconsin, right. They’re evolution. It’s like, well, no, it like, what do you mean? Evolution doesn’t work. It’s not. You can’t point to a particular time in space. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s an internal object like two plus two equals four, because it’s taking place in time and space. So this is very tricky for us. We have these two sort of categories we’ve developed in the West. The concrete. There it is. Time and space. The abstract not in time and space. Two plus two equals four. And then we have the strange intercategorical non locality. Things like evolution and global warming. And let’s remember that when things are intercategorical, they horrify us. They terrify us because they they they point to the cracks in our intelligibility. This is Mary Douglas’s classic proposal as to what is horrifying. OK, so they’re non local. Now, what I just said points to the second feature, which he calls their viscosity. So it’s tempting when we start to think about hyper objects to write to either try to picture them as concrete objects or to do the opposite with which we can be intimate. Or point to them as abstract objects that we can then distance ourselves from in detachment and reflection. The problem with evolution and global warming is we can’t do that. They are simultaneously abstract and intimate evolution is happening in me right now. It’s happening in Jordan right now. It’s happening in all of you. But but that isn’t the sum total of evolution. Evolution is all also happening in Australia. It’s happening in Africa. It’s happening in Asia. It’s happening. It happened in the deep past. It’s going to be happening in the future, a future and a past without us. Without us, it transcends in that manner. So this is what he means by viscous. We are stuck inside of them. They are bigger than us, but we are stuck inside of them. So our usual strategies of control over the concrete and detachment through with the abstract are not available to us. So we have to have another way of relating to these kinds of realities. The third thing about them is what he calls temporal undulation. They resist our sort of temporal grasp. He makes a really interesting point. He says, we’re pretty good with the small finite and the infinite. We can go, yeah, yeah, I get that. I get that. But the really, really large is actually very hard for us. And so when we’re starting, when we like the time scales of evolution, the time scales at which global warming or other things are happening exceed either the finitely graspable or the abstract infinite. And so, again, we are like this is what I mean by temporal undulation. They come into our time space. Like he gives the example of your it’s raining now and it doesn’t usually rain, but because of global warming, it’s raining. So the raining is global warming or the fact that I’m getting more sunburned is global warming. But of course, that’s not the whole of global warming. The global warming is also due to the process is happening in the sun and tectonic things happening on the earth and centuries of process of human activity, etc, etc. So if I can put it this way. The temporal undulation is like it’s the heraclitian aspect of hyper objects. They’re in this kind of perpetual flux that transcends our ability to fully grasp. The next thing is what he calls phasing. This is that to represent hyper objects, we often have to rely on a multi dimensional phase space. We can’t actually track it in sort of Euclidean space. We have to have multi dimensional spaces. And in some of you who know about chaos and other theories, we find attractors in that phase space. And then the attractors, because where does the attractor exist? Is it abstract? Is it concrete? Right. Is it inside my thought? Is it merely nominal? No. Is it just like, ah, right. So. And this is, this is the parmedian aspect. There’s this aspect because the attractor is kind of timeless and spaceless. Right. When the point is the hyper object is both in heraclitian flux and also this parmedian attractor in multi dimensionality. Now this brings out an implication that that Dan and I drew from Morton’s work. Doing all this is not something like tracking hyper objects is not something that can be done by individual cognition, the way it’s bound to particular temporal spatial phenomenology. In order to view this multi dimensionality, for example, we need multiple human beings, multiple machines, multiple observations, multiple laboratories, etc, etc. We need massive distributed cognition to be able to come into a cognitive grasp. Now this warrants the hugely individualistic models of epistemology and cognition we have been developing since the Enlightened. So this is also problematic for us. The next is what he calls inter objectivity. And this is the hallmark of the species of speculative realism that he comes from, which is called object oriented ontology. People like Graham Harmon and himself. So he says we have this well developed notion of intersubjectivity, the way you’re in me and I’m in you and we are I’m in dwelling the other, I’m internalizing the other and the other being the same, we have intersubjectivity. And he says, I want you to think of that as a species of a broader genus. Inter objectivity. All objects independent of human being are doing that with each other. Every object is being internalized by objects and objects are in dwelling other objects. And then he points to features, I’ll use some of my language, because object oriented ontology resists to, it resists what they call overmining and undermining. Undermining is to reduce something to its components. Overmining is to reduce something to its relationship to other things. So the object always has a moreness beyond its relations and beyond its parts and a suchness beyond its relations. And beyond its parts, the moreness is how there’s there’s it’s an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility and the suchness is it has a non categorical being that we can’t ever fully capture, no matter how many categories we pile on top of each other. And so the idea is, and this is what makes it a form of realism, is that objects independent of human knowledge or representation are are appearing to each other and withdrawing to each other in a profound way and hyper objects. What does that mean is that hyper objects are are made out of But you have to resist overmining and undermining when you hear this, they’re made out of other objects, other hyper objects. There’s this weird nesting in which the parts present to the whole but withdraw from the whole, the whole presents to the parts but withdraws from the parts. And so you have and that’s what makes it real. And so I want to now say something I think, and so in the book, there’s quite a bit about aesthetics. And about an aesthetics of trying to grasp the horror. All of this, right, is about induces a kind of horror in us because of all of this deep intercategoric, intercategorical, intercategorical being that we nevertheless can’t control or withdraw from. Okay, so part of what you can see speculative realism doing is it’s trying to bring back and this, this is you can see in the other branches speculative realism, whitehead, the dipolar nature of real of reality. Reality has is Janus based reality means that which we can confirm. Notice what I’m doing here. It’s like the walls of my home. This is reality. It’s home. And what Martin is arguing is that hyper objects remind us in an unavoidable way of the horror side, the horror whole of reality that reality is always that which exceeds our categories, but not out there in some beyond, but also right here in the very crevices and guts of our own being. And then the final point hyper objects, which I already alluded to earlier, they wake us up. But the point is to then see there’s no deep difference between global warming and evolution and important aspects of this object and that every object ultimately withdraws from me. While presenting it to me, every object has a deep past and non human future and it may, you know, it doesn’t mean it’s going to stay in an object that may break up and affect other things. They’re trying to get us to see again that this horror aspect of reality, while most prominent in hyper objects is actually present in that in this weird present but absence sense in every single thing. The reason why I propose this to Jordan and then I’ll shut up and let him talk at length is that I think the acceleration, that’s a term that Morton actually uses. And he talks about now we’re in the age of asymmetry, things are accelerating beyond, right, we are entering into an increasingly asymmetrical relationship with reality. And I propose to Jordan that his account of the acceleration that’s taking place right now is a bonafide example of a horrifying hyper object. Oh, Jesus. Okay. Yeah, I went through a whole bunch of cycles during that. The last one was a like had the feeling of when you spin a coin. Yeah, you got a coin and you’re holding a coin you flip it and if you can imagine like a two year old watching like okay neat and also the coin spinning you look in the fucking coins like standing on its own spinning. Yeah, okay. So let’s hold that last bit right because the last bit is a is a How’s it work. Last bit’s intense. Yeah, the last bit has to do with a client bottle and then the last bit has to do with the last bit. Yeah, the last bit has to do with a client bottle inversion of the interior and the exterior. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We take the technos the technological output of our own agency as a hyper object itself. Yes, we begin to discover the interior hyper object that produces an exterior hyper object like it’s a hyper objects all the way down. You want to talk about something that will Break your mind. Be careful if your mind happens to be one that tends to like hold things in a model space. Be careful of that one because that will Yeah. Or be sitting down when you do that one. Okay. Let’s see. So obviously a bunch of stuff. The first few things that seem simple are like I’m reminded of the You know, the emergence of complexity and chaos theory in the 80s. Yep. And a little bit of the specific of the notion of the reminder, you know, the hey, hey guys, check it out. Yeah, you found a really cool little tool, you know, linear analysis calculus differential equations. Really cool. Like that’s a cool tool. It does neat stuff. Guy bad news for you. It actually only represents the thinnest possible portion of actual reality. Yeah, yeah. We’ve been focusing on it a lot for the past couple hundred years because it’s extremely powerful in the areas that it can deal. But with regard to actually huge chunks of reality, most of reality, it actually isn’t the right tool. Yep. So that was like, that was the big epistemological moral, oh shit, we forgot. We’ve been actually kind of obsessively focused on this narrow thing and kind of fighting over expanding the capacity of it because it’s super cool. And it gives us all kinds of cool power like transistors and nukes, but in airplanes and bridges and well not bridges, but ways of building bridges. But it actually doesn’t do deal with all kinds of other stuff like the immune system or weather or Even financial systems like all the whole domain that complexity is like, hey, by the way, complexity. So that’s one right. It’s almost like just the demoralization Of the meta paradigm of the Enlightenment and saying, hey, cool. What you’re doing is neat and is only a piece of a much larger story. So let’s let’s take a look at that much larger story. Right. And the in this case, the injection of you said the words like horror of and we kind of have to this much larger story on the one hand can’t escape from it. And we’re immersed into it up to the up to the neck or deeper, obviously. And it’s super impactful. We can’t ignore it. Like it’s actually hitting us more and more every day. So it’s not the kind of thing where we can just sort of like Pretend or try to build coping strategies by developing narratives that allow us to basically just be kind of the victim of uncertainty in hyper object space and just, well, you know, The gods got angry, I guess, move on, you know, which is kind of like how it’s worked epistemologically the way it’s worked humans is more or less categorizing the universe into Spaces of of now what we could just call objects where we pretend. All right, what we do is we create an illusion of control. Hey, I actually can separate this jackknife from context and pretend that it’s actually an object in this kind of Western Content context inversion. Or we sort of punt on the context and put it in the myth of poetic narrative layer of shit happens. Yeah. And by the way, our agency is irrelevant. You know, I could just act in complex nature. Willie sort of Willy nilly and try to control of it as much as possible. You know, fencing it and do agriculture build buildings to keep out the weather, etc. And And hope and expect that when shit when a flood comes or this, you know, the drought comes. It’s just like, ah, shit happens. Right, right. And, you know, the point is that as we’re reaching a level of maturity, frankly, like there’s sort of an adolescent response to circumstances reaching a level of maturity, which means also a level of responsibility. Our own agency is increasingly odd. But also the sort of the the boundaries of our capacity to control are largely reached. And so there’s a fragility built into that. Yeah. And yeah, small perturbations in hyper object space lead to large consequences in control space or object space. And here we are. Now we have to actually deal with it. So it’s kind of announced. Now it’s not like the tap on the shoulders, a little bit of the slap in the face is like wake up from your, from your hundreds of years of being, what’s the term like in rapture, but it’s like, you know, like, it’s like, if you’re in the, in the middle of the night, you’re like, oh, I’m not going to be able to do this. I’m human beings. Yeah. She’s Data Refinery sometimes called all that. We are doing suffering or unique things on her like martial arts. Cause they it’s part of all that created her. You know your sort of voice and your own voice and at this point the potential that you’re, like, sort of your own ego shows you that your ageing trait of like, yeah, you know, interesting thing about Jules Fatt. as a wake up, like a cold bucket of water, push, okay. Reality has always been thus, this has always been the case. Many have told this story, now it’s time to actually come eye to eye with it. Yeah. So that’s one arc. The next was, for me, was the first person actual going through that process. So somewhat foolishly, I found myself listening in the beginning of your narrative and understanding it, meaning taking each concept as you introduced it, grasping the concept, running the implications of the concept, holding it as effectively a mental object. Then you added another piece, okay, doing the same thing. Then you added another piece and it was somewhere around the one that looked like this, like the under and over. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That I had effectively stack over flowers like, Oh, shit, I can’t actually, I can’t hold this object. Right. Oh, it’s not an object. We’re talking about hyper objects. Of course. That’s the point. So actually, first person had the first person experience of having to go through the process of shifting my interior relationship with the subject of the conversation, which happened to also be the object of the subject or the object of the conversation. So we were talking about how we were doing the thing we were talking about. Yeah, we were exactly. Therefore, I actually had to undergo the transformation. The transformation was one of shifting to a different mode on a different mode of being in relationship. And when you’re in relationship with an object, there’s a particular mode, right? We have, we have names for it. We have like engineering is an object mode. Planning strategy. These are all object modes, right? We can define discrete timeframes and we can measure, we create statistical models that actually don’t have things like long fat tail distributions, right? We can actually create bound bounded constructs that allow us to engage in a predictable strategic agency over definable timeframes. That’s all stuff that happens in object space, but which doesn’t mean that we’re, you know, we’re sort of fucked when we move out of object space. It just means it’s a different mode. And I would say, and of course you and I have been collaborating in this quite a bit, that a big part of the challenge of now is to, on the one hand, recognize that we’ve become highly over dependent on the mode of choice making or agency in object space. And as a consequence have sort of become dependent on addicted to and underdeveloped in other modes of agency. So we have to consciously sort of recognize that addiction, step away from it, and then go through the process of building, rebuilding our mode of agency that is appropriate to hyper object space. And should we named different names, you can say, okay, just by hypothesis, cognition is a word that is appropriate for object space. And this other thing, distributed cognition, or if we’d like hyper cognition is appropriate to hyper object space. Yeah, yes. And, and by the way, there’s an ordinary trap, which is happening now in the interior, which is one of the primary moves in the Eastern tradition, this has to do with the notion of ego mind. Yeah. So one of the best tricks ego mind has is ego mind tries to pretend that it’s given away the keys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Do that. No, totally. I say do that. Wait, you say do that. Yeah, yeah, I’m totally in charge. I’m not in charge at all. You know, I mean, I’m totally in charge of not being in charge. So one of the challenges that we have is endeavoring to actually shift into hyper object space, and hyper object cognition, hyper object agency. But we try to do it from cognition space. Yeah, ground are often modeling it, we want to model it, we want to plan it, we want to design it, we want to engineer it, we want to control it, we want to be able to do a risk assessment on it. And sort of all of that is part of this other mode. So we have to actually step into this into this new mode, or it’s actually a much older mode, simultaneously, much, much older and new, right? That’s another key piece of this. It’s like, it’s like this new indigenous, it’s an intrinsic characteristic relevance realization, or you’ve got relevance realization at an F is grounded in evolution, and grounded is groundedness, it’s how a an evolved choice making agent makes most effective choices in the context of complex reality. Yes, that’s what it is. So it’s not just indigenous to humans. It’s like indigenous, it’s indigenous to evolution. Yeah, our task is to simultaneously kind of recover or repair our our talk, the NIS or raw indigenousness, and then also step into a new tone of that, which for example, now takes as its object, the class of hyper objects, right, right. Right. And we actually say, okay, we’re no longer trying to simply respond to the obvious, obvious the before sure and yet often oftentimes withdrawn. Sorry, I’m saying this poorly. Your jackknife. Look at the jackknife, there’s sort of two stages to it. One is, or three, one is the pre, oh, of course, it’s part of a complex reality. Then there’s the, oh, no, no, it’s just an object, I can deal with it as a discrete object. And then there’s the Oh, no, it actually is part of a complex reality. And I can expand that and say, okay, well, in many cases, for the most part, our sort of traditional indigenous mode of hyper object was dealing with a particular territory, it might be, you know, several hundred or several thousand square miles of physical land and water. And, you know, the various kinds of environmental ecosystem dynamics and the species and stuff like that. But it never has dealt with the whole world. Right. So now for the first time, we’re having to step back and say, okay, the whole world, and probably actually, like the region out to Mars, or something like that, it’s like the hyper object scope, do we have to learn how to take new responsibility for in the next major arc, like the next major piece of this story, and eventually, you know, larger and larger by hypothesis, but for now that right, right. And if you kind of frame it that way, in some senses, it’s actually not, it’s not that horrible. I mean, it’s daunting, but not horrible. Like, oh, oh, you know, if I’m a two year old, the hyper object of the hyper objective, like my house is, you know, it’s a hyper object, shit goes on, it’s crazy. Like, wow, lights turn on and off. And, you know, suddenly food appears and it’s gone. And whoa, what the hell’s going on? I can’t, I can’t grasp this thing. And by the way, same thing, like I’m in it, that there’s no way of escaping from it. And yet at a certain point, we kind of grow to be able to have a fluid organic relationship with that particular scope of hyper object. And what happens, of course, is we expand, expand our domain of care, like, oh, we can actually step out into a larger milieu. No, sorry, I think, I think this is the last thing I’ll say before I stop. There’s like these two modes here, these two modes that I keep talking about come in, there’s the, the organic mode, which unfortunately, for the past several generations has actually been less than less. You know, but you can imagine the organic mode, you and I probably quite can, of actually living the exploration of your environment. So you get on your bike and you ride around your neighborhood, or back in the early days, you would just walk. And you begin to learn the features of the terrain and notice that the pond in this period of time is big and the pond in this period of time is small. In this period of time, there’s fish, this period of time, there’s turtles. And, you know, when the wind changes, like you get to notice the, the extremely high dimensional signaling structure that is the interface layer between your perception and your agency in the context of the hyper object that is your milieu. Of course, these days, we end up with a fork, which unfortunately happens like around one, where we actually don’t even enter into the complex milieu. And we actually only stay in a complicated object defined milieu of like iPads and cars and schools and you know, scarcely ever touched the complex environment, which means that we’re hyper hyper, and I’ll use that term ironically, maladapted to the actual complexity, which we’ve always been in. I call this the girl with the pink parasol. Remember her from a heart of darkness? Right, right. She’s, oh yeah, that’s one of my favorites short stories. She lives innocently in the beauty of Edwardian England or whatever in London, um, utterly unaware of the darkness and horror and complexity of what the British Empire is and must be to afford her the garden lives in. But it doesn’t, the garden is not real. The complexity of the world is real. The British Empire is real. The garden is a artifact that is produced by that and is sustained by that. And she is utterly defenseless in the context of the larger world, because she has no idea of the world that she’s actually living in. To the degree to which we give our agency into these complicated machineries that are not even meaningfully of our actual design anymore, which separate us from the complexity of the world, we are radically disempowering ourselves. Right? So that’s that, that piece of the story, but to the degree to which we have a sense of a certain scope of hyper object that we naturally have learned how to be in some real, um, you know, hyper agency with, and we got just got caught at naturalness, right? The two words are beautiful because hyper agency puts it over here and naturalness puts it over here. And we realize they’re actually the same. The challenge is to say, okay, to what degree can we use this modality of naturalness of hyper agency to achieve a responsibility or a responsiveness to this much larger scope, the world, the whole world. That’s it. Like that’s, that’s another way of saying, I think the same thing. All right. That’s my, uh, my pong. So I’m not, I have to come up with a good thing. Okay. Um, so there was a lot there that was very, very good. Um, so, um, first of all, it sounded like my proposal of mapping Morton’s thought onto yours was well received. You were able to like really pick it up, um, very well. Uh, and so that, that means that, uh, we do have a good ground for further discussion. I wanted to pick up on a couple of the, a couple of things. Um, cause you invoke the heart of darkness. And I remember, I mean, of course Kurtz’s famous line is the horror, the horror, right? Again, about this. And I wanted to pick up on that because I was wanting, because basically the aesthetics, and this is one of the criticisms I have of Morton is the aesthetics. Like, so when he says aesthetics, by the way, he doesn’t mean like pretty, the prettiness of objects. He means the fundamental way in which you have disposed your sensibility, your mode, that the kind of mode you’re talking about. Yeah. And then what he’s proposing, if you’ll allow me, he doesn’t say this. So I’m making a connection. If you remember, I’ve talked about this before. Jonathan Wright talks about sensibility transcendence and sensibility transcendence. It’s based on a famous example from Iris Murdoch and sovereignty of the good, where Murdoch is talking about the attentional core of morality and are paying attention to things in the right way, right? You know, giving them their due regard is actually the core of all of morality. And she, and she gives the example of the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law and the mother-in-law, right? Things her daughter-in-law is unworthy of her son because she’s sort of coarse. And she’s loud. And that, but then she has this insight. She has this insight. Well, maybe she’s not force and loud. Maybe she’s really present and grounded. And that what, and what Murdoch points out is in order to have that, it’s not just an insight about the object. It’s also a retroflective insight about her habitual framing of things. She has to give up the how she frames her framing. If you’ll allow me that, like she has to allow that to shift in a fundamental way in order to, she, she has to let her understanding of what it is to be a good agent, which she identifies with fundamentally transform in order to see the daughter this way. Yeah. Now, now Wright calls that sensibility transcendence, which is this idea. So he contrasted to sort of Nagelian transcendence from Thomas Navel. This is the transcendence we’re more familiar with. This is where we move up to the view from above and we move to higher orders and bigger scope and right. And we can even move it from the concrete into the abstract. And we’re very familiar with that. Sensibility transcendence is what you see in the modern law. Her transcendence is not up in a way it’s no, no, no. I’m going to allow my cognition to be tailored and fitted to you in your moreness and your suchness, which is not the same thing as rising up through the taxonomy or rising up through spatial temporal context. It’s like, no, no, no. And this was like Collingwood’s idea of art, right? The thing, what art’s primary function, according to Collingwood is to remind us that things are not their categorical identities, which is like, right. And that, that’s what sensibility transcendence is, is to have that insight, like to really remember that, oh, that, that there, right, transcend my categories. And I need to therefore also transcend my categories for myself in order to come into right relationship. Right. So that’s sensibility transcended. And what, what, what Morton is emphasizing with the aesthetics is that kind of sensibility transcendence. Is that, is that okay so far? Great. And then he thinks the primary thing that brings us into relationship to realism, reality, right, is to recognize as a sensibility transcendence to recognize how the object is outside of our anthropocentric framing. And he thinks that the aesthetic experience that points to that is horror. And then again, that’s Kurtz. Now here’s my criticism of Morton. Kurtz is not the hero of the heart of darkness. Marlow is. Marlow, right. And the thing about Marlow, and this is, you know, Conrad’s story, you know, Marlow is cultivating something where he can come into the right relationship of that, which is horrifying without becoming what horror can do to people. Remember how Kurtz is described. He’s clear in his mind, but mad in his soul. He lacks the capacity to do that sensibility transcendence to come into attunement. And Marlow, well, right, but while coming into the horror, right, represents something else. And Conrad, of course, does this through imagery. And you remember at the end of that, where Conrad again invokes the heart of darkness, he portrays Marlow as a sitting Buddha. He even uses the term. Right. And he, so he’s giving up and there’s a couple references to that. There’s also some references to stoicism. But the idea is Marlow represents the opposite, right, Kurtz. And so I was trying to think about this. Sorry, this is long, but like what, like what’s the sensibility transcendence that acknowledges the intimacy of the horror, but also remains in relationship? And what came to my mind then is Otto’s notion of the numinous because the numinous is simultaneously horrifying and fascinating. We are bound into it and we are going through sensibility transcendence. That’s what fascination literally means. And the horror, right, and the horror and the fascination are actually two facets of a deeper thing, which is the mystery of the fact that our attempts to categorize it fail, but we are drawn into it nevertheless. So I was thinking about this as a critique of Morton, which is he wants to claim that both postmodernism and environmentalism fail because postmodernism, right, can’t take it. Postmodernism by trying to wrap everything into the text, I mean one reading of postmodernism at least, I want to be very careful about that, right, by trying to wrap everything in. It keeps trying to point outside of the text while telling us that we’re trapped inside the text, right. And so it can’t really give us a relationship to hyper-objects. And then what is surprising because Morton considers himself an environmentalist is he thinks that most of current environmentalism fails, and this is something that’s deeply intriguing to me because the persistent failure of environmentalism to solve the problem it addresses like is an important feature that we need to acknowledge and take note of if we really do want to save the world. And his proposal is because environmentalism is is to use your language is talking about all of this in object space. It’s talking about all of this in object space and using the categories of modernity, even the category nature as opposed to civilization. Like this is a modern category, right. This is a modern categorical difference. And if you remember hyper-objects persistently fall between the cracks of our bespoke and beloved categorical distinction. We think of them as exhaustive and complete and the hyper-objects is no, no, no, wait, no, no, no, no, no, no, right. And so his thing is that postmodernism and modernism are still are locked and environmentalism is locked and therefore we need a way out. But all he offers, sorry, I’m almost done, is the aesthetic of horror. But I think what he most properly should be offering is the aesthetic of the numinous. Hmm. Well, I’m going to go even further. I would say a practicum of the numinous. Ah, yes. Yes. So it’s like, look, imagine a science fiction story where you’ve just gotten on a rocket. You’ve been raised on earth and you’ve been taken to a colony on, you know, in the in Phobos. So there’s very, very low gravity. Right. Right. You have to learn how to get around. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not like insanity. It’s just a new context, right? You’re going to have to say, okay, well, how do you move? Well, you don’t walk because every time you step, you jump off the moon. All right. Well, you’re going to have to like readjust. You’re going to have to learn how to move in this new context, in this new environment. And I would say that’s the thing where there’s a a practicum. There’s a, okay, here’s the deal. There’s this place over here. Well, again, kind of repeating. Yeah. Yes. Completely agree. Environmentalism, socialism, postmodernism, capitalism. Oddly enough, they give us the sign. They all end in ism. If it ends in ism, it fails for a particular reason, which is that at the end of the day, it endeavors to operate in object space using the agentic categories of object space. What’s your plan? Oh, I don’t know. You’re an object space. Stop that. It’s your strategy. You’re an object space. Stop that. What’s your movement? What’s your narrative? These are all things that are adaptive to responsive in the category of object space. If you want to move and deal with things that are in hyper object space, you’ve got to go through that decompression chamber and learn a new mode, a whole new mode of agency. Okay. It’s Renaissance. This is the Renaissance, the second Renaissance. Fair enough. We’ve done one before. The problem is you’d be done more than that if you understand history. That’s where we are. I think that’s appropriate. The challenge of how do we operate, how do we actually have agency or even what I call sovereignty, literally defining the term sovereignty was, well, in some cases, stealing the term and projecting it in a certain way, pinning it, saying this is the thing. This is what’s on the other side. Once you go through that decompression chamber, you’re discovering this new form of sovereignty that is grounded in this hyper object space and is appropriate and responsive to the hyper object space. What does it look like? Then we can jump. It’s very practical. It looks like practicing meditation first. Why? It’s not the end. It’s the beginning. You get to the, theory U, you get to the bottom of the U. What does that mean? Well, to get to the bottom of the U is to actually exit consciously and effectively the totality of object space. All the habits of mind that move through space by first and foremost instantiating some set of categories, space-time categories, causal categories. That entire, you actually can get to the bottom of the Kantian proposition and recognize as any good meditator has, oh, there’s actually places below this. I can get to. When you get to those places below it, now you’re no longer sitting obligate, unconsciously, habitually, or addictively in the modes of behavior in object space, modes of sovereignty in object space. Now the challenge is the practicum of the numinence. How do we come from the bottom of the U, not just sit there, but actually begin the process of stepping out of that? And this is very odd, but it’s very practical. I mean, like literally standing, like literally staying in the bottom of the U and then doing something like opening your eyes and looking around or uttering a single sentence. The simplest stuff, because you’re actually having to relearn the whole way of being a being in the world from this new dispositional ground. Rehabilitation in the original meaning of the word. Yes, rehabilitation. Exactly. There’s a rehabilitation process. And as you go through that journey, at least now I can go first person, is I have gone through that journey. I’m telling you the story that I came to these conclusions. I willy nilly found myself kind of bouncing off the bottom of the U without understanding what was up. Going through the horror process, grasping the size of the problem, recognizing that the entire category of categories can’t solve it, having no idea what to do next and beginning to go. Failing, finding out where the blind spots were like, you know, triggers, what they call triggers. Triggers are things that pop you out of this new disposition and kind of teleport you or put you on a greased slide into some kind of behavioral perceptual mode that was developed in a previous version of your psychology in response to or using largely tools from object space. When you get triggered, you fall out of hyper object agency and into a pretty poor and also for sure object agency. So you’ll have things like suddenly you’ll notice if you actually can notice your own consciousness when you get triggered, a whole bunch of categories pop up. Yes, very much. And a whole bunch of responses pop up. Now, you could tease that apart, but at any point you get it, right? There’s a whole series of practicum associated with the numinous and in that practicum of the new numinous is also beautifully the emergence of an entirely novel form of collaboration. Right. Can I hit on this for a little bit? Yes, please. So I want to hammer on this particular concept. There are distinct forms, so I’m just going to use that the you metaphor. So the distinct forms of what I’ll call just mostly distributed cognition on either side of the you. Right. On this side of the you, which is to say in category space and object space, distributed cognition takes the form of I’m going to call it coordination. Yeah. And we have a great metaphor for it would be like internet of things is coordination. So there’s some kind of finite protocol and some sort of semantic object that defines how any object in universe can be categorized and some sort of state space of available actions that can be triggered by some change in the state of environment and signaling some sort of finite signaling protocol that can modify state positions in the state space. Right. Use the computational metaphor coordination. And what’s an example of coordination outside of internet of things? Well, capitalism. Yeah. What does capitalism do? Capitalism converts complex reality into a very large menu of objects with a very small menu of actions. Yeah. Mostly exchange. Right. Now, capitalism presents itself as saying, hey, I’m on the inside of a circle. On the outside of the circle is complex reality. So I’m going to take a tree and exit it out of complex reality. Yeah. Enter it into complicated reality and convert it into lumber. Yeah. We’re going to engage in a finite state transaction. It costs $15 for this piece of lumber. Right. You’re now going to manipulate it however you like in this in capitalism space. And you may exit it back out in the form of a chair, which now is entering into your complex life as you’re sitting on it. Right. So saying I’m doing this. But of course we find that it tends to do this expands and puts more and more of life inside the boundary of this complicated coordination structure. Right. We find ourselves increasingly in this. So think about this from human relationships. You know, how much of life these days is governed by complicated coordination structures. We’ve talked about this many times. Yeah, very much. How many, how much of your food, like when you make a meal, take a look at the full set of human agency that is manifested in that meal. Very much. What fraction of that was provided by coordination. Yeah. These days, the vast majority of it, possibly all of it, if you bought it, you know, if you bought your food from a retail establishment, the last thing that’s not coordination is your ass eating it and everything else was you know, driven by coordination structures. Okay. On the other side of the you, right. So we come to the bottom, we’re coming back up and we’re learning how not to play together again as a distributed cognition. But now in this new numinous practicum, this is what I’ve been calling coherence. Right. So coherence. Very helpful, Jordan. Yes, exactly. I thought it might be. Coherence is the name that I use to describe what distributed cognition looks like on the other side of the you. Right. Right. Right. Or is looks like and is and it’s different, right? There’s a whole different sensibility to it. Now, of course, we experience it all the time. If we are dancing the tango with a with a partner, we’re definitely not engaging in coordination and very little discussion and negotiation and transaction. More like a discovery of the high dimensional fluidity that is naturally available to humans in a natural context. Right. You can also do, by the way, coherence with a tree. And this is what the stories every artist is that they feel some kind of relationship with the affordances, the possibility of that complexity. So when we dive back into complexity on the other side of the you, we’re actually just diving back into complexity. This opens up all the other words, right. The horror now shifts to joy as we realize that this always was our natural state. And as we become more and more competent, as we become more and more artful of navigating more and more of complex reality in its own terms, then all kinds of things. This is where meaningfulness comes from. The other side of the you is the ground of meaningfulness. Right. That’s great. I mean, I mean, of course, you’ve talked to me many times before about coherence and I’ve gotten different, but that was a new facet of it. I mean, coherence is itself a hyper object. Right. That was very helpful. So I want to pick up on that because you were specifying some dimensions of the practicum. One is the meditation, the mindfulness dropping. So there’s the meditative practice, but there’s a, and these two need each other, right. The meditative practices, you said of dropping below the categorical space, if I can put it that way, the object space, but you also need the contemplative practice that exposes you to the hyper objects, right. And beyond that transcend because they break through the cracks or they’re more encompassing than the object space. So you need also the, and each needs the other because each counterbalances and corrects the mistakes of the other. One of the things you can write, one of the things that happens here, of course, is I can, the Buddha constantly warned about this, I can become indolent. It’s so peaceful at the bottom of the U. It’s just so peaceful. And that’s weird because that brings a weird kind of quick built egocentrism back in that’s not being recognized in that state. So if I just do the opposite, if I just contemplate without having done the meditation, I’m going to project like crazy. I’m going to project and misrepresent, right. But if I don’t do this, then I won’t properly do sensibility transcendence. Right. And so the two are constantly checks and balance. And then I thought, and then there’s a practicum, which is a practicum of being in distributed cognition that is constantly, continually in contact with both of those poles in a dynamic coupling. And that’s what I call biologos. That’s what I mean by biologos. Biologos is not about object exchange communication. Biologos is, can we get distributed cognition so that people are, and you’re doing this in these practices, you’re reaching in, which that’s even the right metaphor, with mindfulness, you’re reaching out with contemplation, and then you’re trying to do the dynamical coupling that is at the core. You’re trying to, in Eckhart’s, you’re trying to give birth, make space for the logos, for something numinous beyond everybody that is a member of the distributed cognition. So I would say there’s sort of the three dimensionalities at least to the practicum. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Another word that I would just throw in there was Nietzsche’s term levity, you know, just oppose it to gravity. Oh, right. Right. Yes. To become a dancer, to become one that can fly, like this mode of agency that happens when you’re moving. Diologos, if you properly construe it, isn’t just docking, right? Diologos is carving, it’s building, it’s writing software, right? It’s a mode of relationality with outside, or a mode of relationality, full stop, mode of relationality that has a particular disposition, a different quality to it. And so Nietzsche termed that levity, which I thought was a nice term to throw into the mix. Yeah. And so there’s a whole bunch of stuff, right? Things that begin to show up, and these are, many of them become quite simple. And when you’re holding that dual mode of meditation and contemplation, there’s always also always a curiosity and orientation towards the, what’s going to emerge. I wonder what’s going to happen next. That’s interesting. Wonder. Wonder. Right? You’re no longer, you’re no longer, you’re like planning, you’re not trying to make a point. You’re actually curious about what will emerge in the space that has now been opened up, right? The space of possibility is now rendered available. Like you’ve, that’s the point. And that is the point. You’re creating the space, possibility. Now I’m curious, wonder what will happen. You also have an orientation towards your interior. Like you’re always noticing how your interior is a constantly shifting complex milieu of itself. And so many things are arising and being, that are being shown there. And you’re holding them also in a space of curiosity and wonder. Oh, I just got angry. Oh, I just got frustrated. Oh, I just felt allurement. Like whatever it is, like the feelings don’t drive behavior directly. The feelings emerge and then are allowed to actually speak into this wonderfully interesting space with, again, held with curiosity and wonderment. So if I can use riff on that point right there, because this is actually a point I’ve been making in the elusive eye with Greg Enriquez and Christopher Mastapietro on the nature and function of the self. The self or perhaps an older term, the psyche is a hyperobject. It’s a hyperobject to your working memory, to your current state of consciousness. And this is ancient. Heraclitus said, you know, you can’t find the bounds of the psyche because its logos always transcends itself or its logos is unlimited. Right. And so, and this is Carmen, one of Carmen’s point, we have to realize we have to give up the Cartesian sense that we fully grasp ourselves. We also withdraw from ourselves. There’s also a moreness and sectionist to us about our psyche. And so he actually says that one of the things we can think about how this goes with my notion of participatory knowing by this in this amplifies, we said by really tuning into the way I exceed myself, right, the way I the logos, the psyche has a logos that transcends itself. I can fully participate and appreciate how everything also withdraws to itself and is beyond itself. And it’s not a thought anymore. It’s something that I’m enacting. And you know, and Morton talks about, you know, when you’re reaching for the cup, you’re personifying the cup, but at the same time, you’re allowing the cup to cupify you. Right. And that sort of notion there about why this has it’s not just it’s not just a, you know, a helpful tool to be tuning in as you’re also, you know, a tuning outward. It is a constitutive thing you have to do, or you’re really not coming into the right relationship. Yes, in some sense, like the phrase that comes up is something like, you know, until you have learned fully what it means to have unconditional love for and with and from yourself, it is in fact, both impossible. And how do you say it like inconceivable, that you can do this with someone else and from someone else. So you will misconstrue other people. And you will miss project on to other people, because you haven’t yet been able to hold it just in your own self, which, you know, as you said, the boundary of psyche is infinite. So even just the within your own self, if one learns how to do that with one of oneself, one is doing it now in relationship with something that is unbounded. And that’s the point. Now you have right relationship with the unbounded. And that’s that disposition, the dispositions of things like, well, love is sort of the core word, right, unconditional to make space for emergent possibility with curiosity, right, things like that. Those are things that begin to show up as part of the practicum of the numinous. Now, just to put a pause, this is on the other side of the you. Now, what happens oftentimes is that if you haven’t gone through the process of going through the other side of the you, many of these terms, concepts, notions, propositions are translated. Yes, back into object space, where they are misconstrued, inevitably. Yes, it’s a profound instance of from modal confusion. We’re staying in the manipulation of objects based on having mode. And then we keep framing things from the being mode in having mode terms. Yes. So the difficulty then is the difficulty is then, I guess, of course, they mention of the practicum, which is, how do we get a self reflective, self corrective practice within the meditation, contemplation, and theologos? Those are already self correcting, self reflecting, but a practice that is specifically directed towards no, no, no, the modal confusion, this sort of modal confusion. No, no, no, right. We need a practice that it will continually remind us of our proclivity to trying to subsume the hyper object space into the object space. Yes. Well, there’s the learnings that I’ve had. Well, and I would even make even more pointed, because for me, this is highly practical, which is practically, how do we actually do it in the time frame that is reasonable? Yeah. And so for example, there’s a whole complex of what we call psycho technologies. Right. So now we invoke meta psycho technology is the object or the hyper object that helps bind and define the collection of psycho technologies associated with exactly that problem. And there are answers to this question that are relevant in the context of a single individual. So yes, there it is possible as a single individual to achieve that level of sort of stability on the other side of the you. I can’t, but I’ve heard that others maybe can. We certainly notice we have names for those kinds of people, you know, saints and enlightened ones. However, this is a good news. It appears to be the case that although there is a sort of an additional challenge or injection of additional complexity, when you bring new people into the hyper conversation, there also is a shift in that set of psycho technologies that how we help each other do that. And it turns out so far as I can tell that it is in fact, in some sense, let’s say easier to achieve stability of the sword in the context of a saying, huh? Yes. That it is to do so in the context of a Buddha. Yeah, that’s what cognitive science is moving towards. However, we want to, and we’ve talked about this, so I’m just going to use it again as a term. However, we want to think about it. The evidence is converging. Greg has work on this, the justification hypothesis idea, and then you’ve got work of Mercier and Sperber and other people, you know, Hutchins, but especially, you know, in the recent book, The Enigma of Reason, the evidence that we, and I’m speaking here probabilistically, not deterministically, but we are much more likely to achieve better problem solving and distributed cognition than we do in individual. Not only because of sort of just sheer increase of computational power, but also because of the fact that if we frame it right, and we can misframe it, we can go, no, homogeneity, groupthink, no, no, adversarial processing. But if we avoid, if we find the middle path between those, we can get opponent processing where your egocentrism and my egocentrism, you can use my egocentrism to transcend yours, and I can use your egocentrism to transcend mine. And this is why, this is again why I think theologos is so important, because it is the way of trying to say exactly what you said. It encourages us, it gives us hope that we don’t have to individually become the Buddha, because the Sangha has a potential that doesn’t require us to be Buddhas, to nevertheless itself be a Buddha. Yep, yeah, exactly. And here’s some very simple reasons why this is the case. Things like statistically, it’s extremely unlikely that my legacy triggers and your legacy triggers are the same. Yes. So what that means now is that we have a portfolio of coherence, meaning that if something comes along that sort of randomly triggers me, I may drop out of coherence, but you don’t. Right. Now you’re in a place where you can actually come from a place of coherence and help me find a context that brings me back into coherence, which might be a simple thing. By the way, my collaboration with Vanessa and now with our daughter has been just this, like this has been the reason why we became partners was this. This is what we’re doing. This is our sort of our mutual collaborative project. Literal coupling. Literal coupling and examples, like simple examples like, hmm, I noticed that swimming in the ocean is a great way for you to get grounded again. You know, I know it. So there’s like we’ve developed whole protocols like, shit, when I’m, you know, totally going in this direction, here’s like four or five things that are kind of likely things to just to recommend or remind that I’ll probably have lost track of because I’m in, I’m no longer sovereign and just being able to provide those like doing very, very analytically radically increases the probability of me doing them. And we’ve identified them as radically increasing the probability of me finding my way back into sovereignty. Cool. There’s a lot of basic things. If you’re willing to bind your identity to the person, if you’re willing to actually enter into that contract. Yep. If that’s an agreement, if that’s a mutual agreement, it has to be a mutual agreement and it can’t look like this. Like this is from the in object space. Relationships look like that. Yeah. And that’s a binding in object space in hyper object space. Relationships look like that. Yes. Yes. Very much continuity of contact rather than closure of control. Yes. Yep. Yeah. Which has its own challenges and risks, right? Everything has got its own stories, but it also has its own beauty. Of course. Yeah. Not properly captured. So, I mean, that model, I mean, and that’s that, you know, this is what I’m, because I’m deep in this literature. This is the classic platonic model, right? If we have what, what we can do is we can, we can increase plausibility. We, your biases and my biases, your triggers and my triggers, right? Right. So, possibility is when I have many independent lines. And so what we come to is not due to the bias or the idiosyncratic triggers of each independent entity, I increase trustworthiness, but I also now get the possibility of elegance. I get the possibility of emergence because you and I can afford each other’s self-transcendence. So what we get is we get a circumambulation of that generates plausibility to use a sort of platonic metaphor, right? We have a bunch of people around the topic, right? And we converge on it in a trustworthy fashion. And then it broadcasts back to us like global broadcast. It’s emergence, elegance, new ideas, new insights that we all can share in. So it’s not only that we give each other, you know, affordances around triggers, we also give each other insights that take us beyond where we were. All right. Now let’s throw in religion. Okay. All right. Because I think we can actually, we can make it very simple. I mean, gosh, people get so wound up about stuff. So what’s religion? Religion is the recognition of the utility and the necessity of taking advantage of the objective to support, to offload the cognitive load of trying to actually maintain the various states associated with collective coherence. So for example, trying to remember to do to stretch, just to literally stretch, right? Trying to remember to stretch every day. If I’m running it in pure individual Jordan cognition, it ain’t gonna work. Right? All kinds of stuff, even just like drink enough water, like filling, just like take simple stuff, but drink enough water, stretch every day, just go to drink enough water. Like I was supposed to drink X amount, right? I discovered over the last week, because I shifted from Hawaii, which happens to have an hyper abundance of water, just in the ambient environment to San Diego, which is a desert. My body’s like, what the hell happened? Oh, I don’t drink enough water. Okay. What if I bind some phenomena in objective reality, like say, every time that I eat, I also drink, you know, so I notice that eating emerges very easily, eating happens, I’m gonna eat. And if I just noticed that eating and drinking have to be bound, right? It seems banal, but I’m just making a very simple banal example. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If I can create that binding, that a particular behavior that is triggered by something in objective reality or easier one, every sunset, we all choose to stop what we’re doing. And we go outside and we hold a moment of silence while we watch the sunset. Right. Right. But what are we doing? There’s a whole bunch of like, high quality psychology benefits of disconnection from what you’re doing, breathing, even just like, we call it sun spectrum, like there’s a whole bunch of stuff and the sun’s going down every day. So I don’t have to remind myself to go do a breathing practice. If I bind a breathing practice to watching the sunset go down, now I get the support of the scaffolding of the fact that I happen to live in a causal objective universe to allow me to have the set of behaviors that I’ve already identified as being highly constitutive of my ability to maintain myself on the other side of the queue. Right. So that piece ritual is one side of religion, another side of religion. Hold on. The other side of religion is a little bit harder to get a hold of, but it’s something like this. It’s like, um, thoughtful, careful, careful. One might even say sacred partitioning, uh, vocation. There we go. Right. Right. Right. You have the set of religion is this term vocation and vocation is to say, Hey, it, where you are uniquely capable because of your natural proclivities and aesthetics to, to provide high quality care with regard to some piece of shared livingness, there lies your vocation to the degree to which we can collectively provision our shared needs by means of individuals sitting in their vocation, the likelihood that the things that we’re doing are going to be constitutive to our health and wellbeing is extraordinarily higher. Yeah. So I need to eat food. Growing food is not my vocation. Right. So in some sense, somebody else is going to be growing the food that I’m going to be eating. Now I can do that through coordination and I can go to the grocery store and pay an anonymous farmer, by the way, probably far away from me in space and time, but now I have very little awareness of both the implications of what the food is coming to me is all about. Who knows what’s actually happening. And also the implications of what my causal consequences going out are who did I enslave on route to this production, right? Things like ethical capacity just gets ameliorated by chains of coordination. By contrast, if I’m living in a place with a person, people who are committed to permaculture and it is their vocation and they’re growing food right over there and they’re part of my community and I know them and I support them with my vocation, the causal chains in both directions are both short, but also extremely certain. I’ve heard likelihood that somebody who’s eating the food they grow and they’re growing it because it’s their vocation, not their job, that that food is going to be healthy and well considered for me is much, much higher, vastly higher. And so this is another piece of religion. Religion is that how do we orient things so that the probability that the pieces, the components of our whole well-being are well held by a wholeness of communities. Right. Yes. And that’s different than straight coherence, right? Coherence is sort of a means by which we can make sure that everyone is actually oriented towards their vocation and supported by a wholeness that allows them to have what they need. Like it’s a means for that. The religion is more like the practical implementation of it. How do we actually accomplish it and how do we sort of go through the process of discovering where we’re doing it well and where we’re doing it poorly and the various rituals that then give us the appropriate structure to be able to go about doing it, you know, repairing. So a ritual of like church, like gathering together. Think about that. Like what’s the point? Here’s the point. First, we create a space where we all or enough the appropriate size of us gathers together. By the way, not too many, not too small. Mega church, bad idea. Too many people can’t do it. 150 people, probably a really good size. Right. People who maybe aren’t always interacting with each other. We get together. We create a very particular process, a certain amount of time and space that slows things down, regrounds them, probably seeing things like singing or breaking bread that allow us to reorient and just be conscious of what it’s like to be in coherence with each other, support each other through a variety of gratitude practices. And in Hawaii, it’s the ho’oponopono, like the absolution coming back into right relationship practices so that everybody’s on the same page, you know, healing and coming back into wholeness as community. Then ideally what happens is, is then the group, the gathered church, go through a process of actually engaging in this sort of stochastic, um, gumbar level relational dynamic where people begin to be engaged in pairwise and small group conversations and very high bandwidth. Now super supported high bandwidth because the container has been created to hold them in a state of coherence, which is going to be doing a whole bunch of stuff about negotiating. Hey, you know, I got to say the other day, I really felt like you dropped the ball here. I apologize. You know, all that kind of stuff, which needs to happen anyway, but now the container has been created to enable that to occur. Right. That’s what we’re trying to do. Like that’s that object. That’s what’s supposed to be happening in that space. Um, and all the psycho technologies that are built into that object are ideally thoughtfully designed to support the context to enable that process to play out. Right. That’s also religion. That’s what we’re talking about. When we talk about religion as a function, that’s the objective. That’s the thing is there to do. That’s great. That was really beautiful. Um, I think that’s very convergent with, uh, a line of thought I’ve been developing. So I’ll put a sort of cognitive science spin on it, where I think, uh, and you’re picking up on religio, right? The binding, right? Um, so I think, uh, religion as imaginatively augmented, like augmented reality, imaginatively augmented serious play that affords people the ability to get into the right relationship with themselves, with each other, and with the universe at large. Um, and so, um, I, and we’ve been talking about this a lot, but this gives me another way of talking about something we’ve talked about before, which I think you’re alluding to, which is the religion that’s not a religion, because the problem, the problem we face is that that is, that is, well, religion is a hyper object, right? Um, it is the kind of thing that is prototypically prone to being confused in that modally confusing way we talked about before. Yep. Where, right, where, where, and you know, and Karst talks about this, uh, when he talked, when he contrasted religion with belief. Belief is about moving into object space, right? Moving into complicated coordination, right? Creating structure, right? In that way. And then he talked about religion is basically like religio, right? This, this, this, this, right? This use of imaginatively augmented serious place so that we can do that kind of sensibility transcendence. We can attune to, we can do that, the meditation in the contemplation out the dialogue, the dialogos between, right? And he, you know, and he said the first one is a finite game. The second one is an infinite game. And what’s interesting is he points out an important characteristic, uh, about the grammar. So there’s, right, there’s winners in the finite game. There’s no winners in the infinite game. And that’s reminds me of Plato’s contrast between Philea and Ikea and Philea Sophia, because one of the moves you’re allowed to make in the finite game is to change the rules by which the game is played. Right? So, so in fact, the, the aesthetic of this is to be able to do that. It reminds me of when I was talking with Granada Castro recently and, you know, and we come in and we’re, you know, we come from different philosophical positions and there’s an originally debate and that’s appropriate because we’re talking about science and that it has its place. But Kurt was very good because he also sort of called, uh, called us out and said, well, can you try and move into what John calls dialogos? And then we were doing that. And this was even more the case in the second one. Um, and I don’t want to talk about a move that I sort of discovered, but anyways, um, cause what happened is we started to move from, I, you know, uh, my position should win your position to lose to no, no. How can we, like you start to, uh, you start to appreciate the beauty of the dance as opposed to trying to get to the satisfaction of the victory. There’s a, there’s a, there’s a deeply profound shift in which both people start to realize, oh, this itself, let, how can we do this? And how, right. And so that, that like constantly being able to shift the rules. And one of the, one of the things I did as a very practical thing is this was in between the two talks. I went away and I thought, okay, Bernardo is really sharp and he was really, you know, he was really present. He was really engaged. How can I be properly responsible for that? And so I went and I thought, and then I talked to other people, I talked to Matt and I did some, and I thought what I should try and do is I should try and move towards his position, not as a sign or a prediction that I’m going to finally agree with him, but just moving, what can I derive from my position? What can I give and what can I derive that will move me towards his position so that he will see me as being responsible rather than me just blaming it. And then what that might do, and in fact did is it will trigger him to respond in kind. And then you get this kind of thing happening. And so I’m one, like you see what I’m trying to get at the religion. It’s not a religion. It’s really, it’s trying to, it’s trying to get that self-reflective, corrective thing to saying, don’t stop trying to put this into object belief space. Oh, I like that, object belief space. That’s good. Right. Instead, now what you have to do is you have to keep watching that. You have to build in the infinite game. You have to be able to constantly shift, right? So that it doesn’t do that. It doesn’t do that. Yeah. So let me re-characterize what you said there a moment ago. And in so doing endeavor to do the thing that you were talking about, but also to help bring out some of the risks or error conditions that can sometimes show up. So you said, try to find a way that I can move my position towards his position, right? As a sign of the dance. Hold on, hold on. Exactly. Even it’s like a sign, like there’s such a complexity. If you’re sitting on this side of the, you get confused. And by the way, you tend to get like, what is it? Hostile or defensive, right? There’s a whole bunch of stuff that happens on the side of you because the ego is in charge and that’s what the ego does. I’m confused, defend. Let’s see. So if you’re in this position, you don’t mean bullshit yourself into saying things he says. You don’t mean pretend to say things that you don’t really believe. You don’t mean any of that, right? None of that. The whole category. Like I can give more examples and the high part, what I’m trying to say is each example is a part of a whole category and that whole category, not that. What you mean is something like, and it feels to me, it feels very organic. It’s like find the sun, the sunlight that is shining from the direction that he is coming and the aspect of you that is most available to emerge a growth bud of greenness, a green shoot in that direction. More like that. Like really sit and listen. Okay, I’m just going to keep rotating this conversation until I feel something shows up where there’s like a warmth and like a coziness or a yearning of, oh, okay. And now I’m not bullshitting myself. I’m actually growing. I am growing from my own interior sense of my own highest values are actually being supported and I’m actually giving myself an affordance to grow and in so doing, right? Simultaneously actually showing, hey, I heard you because your heart’s greatest yearning is endeavoring to express itself through the things that you’re saying and goddamn language is terrible. So I’m acknowledging that I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you. The words you’re saying create all kinds of barriers, but I’m listening. Yes, here. Here’s what just happened when I listened. Do you feel that listening occurred? And when I felt sense of, oh yeah, listening occurred. Why? Because I actually grew in that direction and that direction is a direction that you can feel as towards you or more importantly, towards the thing that is expressing itself through you, the source that you are a growth from. I think about that. Like imagine the notion that there is some source, your soul to use that language, right? And from birth, you have been feeling reality from that source and everything that’s in alignment with that source is allowed to accumulate on that source. Everything that’s more in alignment with that feels more in alignment with your soul. So then when your soul and the other person’s soul grow in the same direction, like, whoa, okay, that’s much, much deeper than anything that could ever have been communicated in language and it gives language its proper place, right? Which is basically it’s a fucking envelope. Yeah. Right. The words are the envelope. They are not the poem. Yeah. The words are not the poem. Keep working through that. If you’re on this side of the you, every time you hear a word, it’s just an envelope. Open it up. Inside is something. It cannot be worded. If it’s worded, it ain’t, it’s still more envelopes. Just keep going until you finally have no more envelopes and yet there’s still a something. So the poesis in the language is a facet of the autopoesis of the individual. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So then let’s go to that last piece. I think we have a little bit of time left. I’ve got about two minutes, actually. Perfect. Let’s tackle the problem of acceleration in the tech industry. So we have, well, I’ll throw one thing out there, just like a little tiny one, but I think it’s quite nice. We can pick it up in the next in the next discussion. Good. Yeah. So let me put an entree and I’ll put an entree or an aperitif. Yeah. What’s the problem of the technosphere? The problematic, the problematic of the technosphere, which just has to do with this fact that our hyper object self has as one of its characteristics, it expresses itself in the form of technology, which is to say in the form of changes in reality. And the technology is simultaneously a hyper object and has its characteristic. It actually deepens the complexity of all the other hyper objects with which, with which we are in relation. Yeah. And it’s viscous with us. It’s in us. It transforms us to our core. It’s not just out there as an object that we manipulate. So there are two problems, I think, at the core of it. One problem is straight up weaponization. So this goes back to all the other stuff that happens on this side of the you. The egoic use of technology and the degree to which technology is some weapon to control and or conquer, control nature or control and conquer other people or yourself as the case may be. That’s a whole category. And in some sense, we can say it’s not that. Now there’s some complexity and how do we step away from weaponization? How do we resolve the game theoretic problematics associated with, well, if I stop doing it and they don’t, then all that, a whole bunch there. But then you have another one. So I just want to put these two out there. The other one is the wonderment, the nobility, the beauty of the curiosity of, well, yeah, but I really want to explore impossibility and create new things. The actual deeper thing, everybody who right now is mostly unfortunately acting as agents of out of control accelerating technology. Almost certainly when they were four, six, 10, 12, we’re just curious and playfully finding that they were really interesting things that they could do that created new possibility and noticing that there are ways to solve problems by creating new possibility. So we want to hold that. We want to take that first category, weaponization, and we want to unwind that. The second one, we want to hold in the right place. Yes, more creation of possibility. That’s a part of the human story. It’s part of levity. It’s what we want to do. And also not recklessly, not obsessively. And how do we hold that well on the other side of the U? All right. So one thing I’ll say is I think that circles us back to the role of the numinous, the role of the numinous as being that which helps hold us. Because if we think of it as we holding ourselves, we’re back in the ego space. We need to be in right relationship to something in which we are held rather than something that we just simply hold. So I’m going to put that as an initial response that we can pick up next time. Nice. All right, man. Great. I’m glad to be back in sync with you. Yeah, me too. That was wonderful. Okay. Bye bye.